1. Field
Embodiments presented herein relate to the field of computer animation and, in particular, to stylizing animations by example.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hand-painted imagery can achieve a warmth and range of styles that is difficult to replicate with three-dimensional (3D) computer rendering. However, many visual styles are currently unsuitable for use in animation because of the difficulty of maintaining temporal coherence, which has been described as a compromise between three goals: flatness (preservation of the 2D appearance of the simulated style), motion coherence (correlation with the apparent motion of the 3D scene), and temporal continuity (minimization of abrupt changes in time). For example, fine-scale texture detail is a common and often important feature of visual styles. In animations, such texture details may change from frame to frame, however, and it can be prohibitively time consuming for an artist to manually paint each frame to ensure that the texture details change smoothly from frame to frame without causing flicking, propping, or other artifacts.
Techniques have been introduced for generating painterly animations having specific styles, such as watercolor, pen-and-ink hatching, and sparse brush strokes. However, current techniques apply to a narrow range of visual styles, and give artists little direct control over the end result. As a result, artists cannot easily create animations having their own unique styles, or many other styles which they may prefer.